Chapter 1:

It was a cold winters day and the snow remained untouched. It was just a white expanse as far as the eye could see. Very romantic. But I have quite a peevish tendency to want to ruin beautiful things. I don’t know what it was about that morning. The completeness of the image laid out before me seemed so perfect that it appeared forbidden to touch, but at the same time it was calling to me: daring me to ruin it’s perfection. I for one, longed to answer its call. It had been an awful year my eyes were raw from all the tears I had shed. I had failed all my exams despite being the top of the class all year round. Now I was surrounded by judging eyes and although the words remained unspoken I was being suffocated by their Constance: “How could you fail”… “You should have done better, tried harder”… “ Look at her she thinks she’s so smart that she didn’t even try”. I was bombarded by all these false accusations when the reality was that I had been frozen by the fear of failure. The irony was that it had actually happened! Honestly I did not pine for my education, or the loss that the world would deal for me as a consequence… It was only the silent expectations of the vultures that surrounded me: hungry for my continued failure and my dead body, turned to carrion.

After that melancholy episode I soon resolved to succeed at something else. Finally find my own dream; travel and enjoy my life. It sounds – sounded – like the perfect plan, but what followed was merely my swift spiral into depression.

I finally got a job! I had no qualifications so I was all set for a humble life. I never wanted to have a big car and who needs to live in a mansion anyway! I can walk around all the time and a small apartment is big enough for one person. You would get lonely in those hallways all alone, with nobody to keep you company. I had no qualifications so I couldn’t go for anything big, but I still couldn’t shake the studious girl out of me… So I got a job at a bookstore. I was good with my hands and the owner taught me how to mend the second hand books that were donated. My idea of procrastination was reading some of the notes that people put into the covers of the books: notes to lovers; from a grandmother to her granddaughter; presents from colleagues at work. I was living in a sort of romantic notion that I had. It seemed as if time had stopped for that brief moment of bliss in my life. I wasn’t that social so I lived mostly as a recluse, establishing my own order and schedule. But… For the first time in my life I felt content with what I was doing – I was finally making my own life and following my own path. Like I said, time had stopped, the cherry blossoms froze in mid-air like delicate pink petals of snow. If I put them between my fingers I could feel their unique texture – a cross between the finest silk and some sort of fur. People passed by in slow motion and I was lost in my own thoughts, my own bubble. So it was on the way to work one day that I felt an overwhelming feeling of happiness , as if: today is going to be a good day. Perhaps I smiled and skipped merrily on the cobblestones to work. I don’t remember what I was wearing on that day, possibly a skirt, it escapes me but it feels important. But I remember now, a white skirt, pure white, like snow. Such a delicate and pure white it was too. What happened afterwards? I can’t remember. It’s been a blank for years and that scares me. I was found a few blocks away from work. It’s a mystery whether I made it there or not. You might think that I had never made it to work that day, but I don’t know if I did. Because that day the old man who owned the shop was found dead – two stab wounds in his heart and not a trace of evidence as to who did it. I was found two minutes from the shop, out and positioned as if I had been running away from the direction of the shop, not skipping towards it. What’s more is that blood was found on me, I was soaked through. The blood stained the pure white skirt and it was tarnished. I wondered if at that time the pure innocence that I had been living in until then was soiled too. At that moment my life changed forever and I wished that I could go back and stop it from happening, or to disappear so that I wouldn’t have to face the cruelty of this world. I was the prime suspect for the case of my employers murder, but no traces of evidence were found and the blood on my skirt was mine, despite there being no signs of injury. I was found not guilty, but only for lack of evidence concerned with the case.